When food prices rocket, the dishwasher runs over. and the TV breaks down, do you nostalgically yearn for life in simpler times? For most of us, this dream, set in a farm kitchen with its cozy warmth and home cooking includes plump, homemade doughnuts rolled in sugar; moist, buttery layer cake; a baked country ham glazed and studded with cloves; shimmering jelly; and perhaps a jar of crisp cookies. The kettle's on the stove, the house gleams with polished furniture, and outside fresh-washed linens hang dazzling in the sun. Nell Nichols invokes it all in this new edition of The Farm Cook and Rule Book, a guide she wrote for farm wives (and that meant one of every four adult American women) in 1923.
At that time Nell Nichols was a young home economist and food writer in Kansas. Her information was first hand, for she traveled throughout the Midwest, collecting recipes and noting the techniques of good housekeepers. The recipes she gathered and originated then are reproduced here with marginal notes to bring them as close to today's conditions as possible. There were no standard sizes then, no portable electric appliances, few electric ranges. But there was delicious food on country tables and, starting with her basic traditional recipes, you can re-create that old-time goodness for your family.
Like her counterpart today, the country woman of 1923 had other concerns. Labor saving, for one. Some of the "modern" devices offered her fifty years ago were a kerosene stove, a self-heating iron, a carpet sweeper, a floor mop. But she was also encouraged to preserve foods by drying, a method once again in favor as today's homemakers fight the shortage of canning equipment.
Grandmother's contemporaries were also beauty conscious, and Nell Nichols recalls some of their most effective secrets creams and lotions made from foods. This is a discovery countless cosmetics makers have also made, but there's a charm about the formulas given here that no laboratory can duplicate. Try them yourself and trim your beauty budget.
For today's woman, the new edition of The Farm Cook and Rule Book will be like having a mentor from the days when American homes were run on love and ingenuity a system worth preserving.

There's a mountain of practical advice for all household needs:

There are also directions for reviving some of the old-time customs that so many people yearn for today:

You'll find here more than seven-hundred basic old-time recipes, and variations; almost two-hundred homemaking suggestions; plus delightful homey chapters on caring for the sick and for your own personal appearance. It's a close-up view of life in the early twentieth century and it has much to offer everyone in search of the good life as the century draws nearer to a close.

Nell Nichols was reared on a ranch near Dodge City, Kansas. After receiving her M.A. in home economics and journalism (the first such degree given by the University of Wisconsin), she wrote for The Copper Farm Press in Kansas and later became field food editor for The Woman's Home Companion. Mrs. Nichols is a recognized authority on country cooking and rural homemaking. She is a member of the American Home Economics Association, Women in Communications, and Omicron Nu, honorary society for women in home economics. Since the 1950s she has been associated with Farm Journal, first as food editor, then as field food editor. She continues to oversee some recipe testing and with the magazine's food staff has authored fifteen cookbooks. Mrs. Nichols' daughter, also a home economist/author specializing in food, and her granddaughter have been her inspiration in preparing the updated annotations for this fond look backward to a less complicated era.